When a local gentleman tried to quell the uprising at Sampford Courtenay and was hacked to death on the steps of the parish church, his body was buried in the alignment of north to south; this testified to the fact that he was considered to be a heretic. The uprising, now touched with blood, soon spread. An historian of Exeter, John Hooker, wrote at the time that the news ‘as a cloud carried with a violent wind and as a thunder clap sounding at one instant through the whole country … they clapped their hands for joy and agreed in one mind to have the same in every of their several parishes’. The rebels from Devon were joined with those from Cornwall, and the combined force captured Crediton; it was retaken by loyalist troops but only at the expense of burning all the barns in which the rebels had been hiding. ‘The barns of Crediton!’ became a popular war cry.
A story had just come out of Clyst St Mary, a village 3 miles east of Exeter. Walter Raleigh, the father of the famous mariner, was riding towards the town when he observed an old woman on her way to Mass praying with a set of rosary beads in her hand. He stopped to rebuke her, ‘saying further that there was a punishment by the law appointed against her’. The woman hurried on to the church where she denounced the gentleman for his ‘very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion’. She also told her fellow parishioners that he had made the threat that ‘except she would leave her beads and give over holy bread and water the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil therein’. This was a general and impolitic menace to the whole community; Raleigh was found and beaten, while a local mill was burned down. The events became part of the rebellion itself.
At the beginning of July 2,000 rebels marched in procession towards Exeter; they were guided by priests, robed and chanting, and at their head was the sacred pyx, or jewelled container, holding the Blessed Sacrament. They had come to besiege the town as an emblem of detestable heresy. The townsmen of Exeter resisted the siege with valour, despite the restrictions of food and water; one of them said that ‘he would eat one arm and fight with the other before he would agree to a surrender’.
The protesters had drawn up a set of articles in which it was stated that ‘we will have the holy decrees of our forefathers observed, kept and performed and the sacrament restored to its ancient honour’. They denounced the Book of Common Prayer itself as ‘a Christmas play’ or ‘a Christmas game’; this observation came from the fact that at the time of receiving communion the men and women were supposed to form separate groups. This was uncannily similar to the first movement of a festive dance, and so invited ridicule.
The rebellion could not, or would not, be quelled by the local magnates; as a result, Somerset was obliged to call in his own soldiers, most of whom were mercenaries from Germany and Italy. Never before had an English ruler called in foreign troops against his own people. Six battles were fought against the rebels, the most bloody of which was at the village of Clyst St Mary itself, where on 25 July Lord Russell launched an attack on approximately 2,000 of what must now be termed the enemy; 1,000 rebels died in the action, and 900 were taken only to be massacred on Clyst Heath. It was said that all their throats were slit within ten minutes. The village was put to the torch and many of the villagers were murdered. It may be true that no heretics were burned during the regime of Protector Somerset, but this general carnage must count as one of the horrors of religious warfare. When they heard of the killings another force of rebels marched to Clyst Heath, where 2,000 of them were dispatched.
Russell then moved on to relieve Exeter but, by the time he arrived, the rebels had broken off their siege and departed. Yet retribution could still be exacted. A ‘mass priest’ was hanged from the steeple of the church of St Thomas, in the south of the city, wearing his vestments and draped with the bell, beads and holy-water-bucket of the old faith. The mayor of Bodmin was summoned to dinner, after which he was invited to inspect the gallows. ‘Think you,’ he was asked, ‘think you it is strong enough?’
‘Yes, sir, it is.’
‘Well then, get you up, for it is for you.’
The mayor had in fact been forced to participate in the rising by the rebels. But revenge always includes rough justice. A final battle at Sampford Courtenay, where the riots had begun, was enough to dissolve the Prayer Book Rebellion.
Just as one fire was slowly being extinguished another flared up. In the second week of July a group of Norfolk inhabitants threw down the pales and hedges of the enclosed fields and then, under the leadership of Robert Kett, made a camp on Mousehold Heath just outside the walls of Norwich. Other people from the surrounding countryside flocked to them, to protest against what they considered to be the iniquitous oppressive regime of the gentry, and it was estimated that some 16,000 gathered beyond the city walls. One group of villagers from Heydon marched behind their parish banner, thus testifying to their allegiance to the old faith. Somerset and his councillors purported to believe that the revolt was being spread by ‘some naughtie papist priests’.
Kett and the other leaders of the revolt sent a series of articles to the protector in which they outlined their complaints; they prayed his grace ‘that no lord of no manor shall common upon the commons’ and that ‘copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII’. No lord of the manor should be able to exploit common land. Private jurisdictions should be abolished. Their demands in general are clear evidence of a belief in the ancient and traditional ways of the countryside; the rebels were not innovators but conservators, protesting against the encroachments of a free market, the rapacity of newly rich landlords, and the steady depreciation in the value of money. They wished to return to what can be called feudalism. That is why they also wished to retain the old faith. It is significant that the rebels in Norfolk had first come together at a play concerning the translation of Thomas Becket to the shrine of Canterbury.
A phrase passed around that they would leave as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls – none at all, in other words. ‘All power is in the hands of the gentry,’ it was reported in the first history of the rising, ‘and they so use it as to make it unbearable; while nothing is left for us but the extreme of misery … What is our food? Herbs and roots. Since we too have souls and bodies, is this all we are to expect from life?’ A verse was left on the carcass of a slain sheep:
Mr Pratt, your sheep are very fat,
And we thank you for that;
We have left you the skins to pay for your wife’s pins,
And you must thank us for that.
The protector had told the imperial ambassador that ‘all hath conceived a wonderful hate against gentlemen and taketh them all as their enemies … In Norfolk gentlemen, and all serving men for their sakes, are as evil-handled as may be.’ As a precaution a bodyguard of 2,000 horse and 4,000 soldiers was established around the young king. The gates of London were strengthened, and a drawbridge placed upon London Bridge. On 18 July martial law was declared, and even to mention rebellion was to draw down death at the end of the rope. It is a measure of how local revolt could threaten the whole harmony of Tudor administration, based as it was upon an informal pact between the centre and the regions. Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.
The rebels on Mousehold Heath declared themselves to be ‘the king’s friends and deputies’, emphasizing once more their role as traditional loyalists, and brought a semblance of order into their confused ranks. Spokesmen for each hundred were appointed, and Kett ordained that justice would be dispensed beneath a great oak that became known as the Tree of Reformation. Certain gentlemen and landowners were paraded beneath the tree, charged with robbing the poor, and then imprisoned within the camp.